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The Buffalo News/Saturday, June 10, 2017

WASHINGTON NEWS
POLITICAL
NOTEBOOK
DI S T R IC T OF C OLU M BI A

Trump commits U.S.
to NATO obligation
WASHINGTON – President
Trump on Friday made an
explicit commitment to NATO’s
core mutual defense obligation,
weeks after he declined to
do so at a meeting of alliance
members in Brussels.
“I am committing the
United States to Article 5,”
Trump said in response to a
question during a Rose Garden
news conference with the president of Romania. “Certainly we
are there to protect.”
That he previously omitted
any reference to the NATO
charter obligation in remarks
at the organization’s new
headquarters last month
deepened concerns among
the other leaders of member
nations concerning the future
of the trans-Atlantic alliance in
the Trump administration.
The White House has
downplayed the omission, and
even called the dust-up “silly.”
At the news conference
Friday, Trump praised
President Klaus Iohannis
and Romania for raising that
nation’s defense spending to
meet the alliance’s goal of 2
percent of national GDP– a
threshold that predates
Trump’s time in office, but one
he has championed.
– Los Angeles Times
NEW YORK

Schneiderman probing
Eric Trump’s charity
ALBANY – New York
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is “looking into” a
charitable foundation founded
by Eric Trump, a spokesman
for Schneiderman said, after
Forbes magazine raised questions about whether President
Trump’s son had made
misleading statements about
how the foundation spent its
money.
“The attorney general’s
office is looking into issues at
the Eric Trump Foundation
raised by the Forbes report,” a
spokesman said.
One item at issue was that
the Eric Trump Foundation has
rebranded itself “Curetivity”
and held a fundraiser under
that name. But the charity had
not officially changed its name
with New York regulators.
Forbes probed the foundation’s tradition of holding
fundraiser golf tournaments
at Trump-owned courses.
Although Eric Trump had
asserted repeatedly that his
father’s company allowed
him to use the courses free,
Forbes found evidence that
the Eric Trump Foundation
has actually paid the Trump
Organization to use them.
– Washington Post
DI S T R IC T OF C OLU M BI A

Justice Dept. wants
ethics suit thrown out
WASHINGTON – The
Justice Department asked a
federal court late Friday to
dismiss a lawsuit that accused
President Trump of violating
the Constitution by continuing
to own and profit from his businesses, arguing in part that,
even if he had broken the law, it
would be up to Congress, not a
federal judge, to act.
The government also
argued that the lawsuit is based
on a faulty interpretation of the
Constitution and that the plaintiffs had not demonstrated
any revenue loss because of
Trump’s business operations.
The lawsuit was filed this
year in the U.S. District Court
for the Southern District of
New York by the Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington, or CREW, a legal
watchdog group. It is seeking a
court order to force Trump to
divest himself of his business
holdings on the grounds that
the Constitution prohibits
him from accepting any
economic benefit from foreign
governments or from the U.S.
government beyond his salary.
The other plaintiffs include
a group that represents restaurants, the owner of a hotel and
restaurant business in New
York, and a woman who books
hotel events in Washington.
– New York Times

President’s lawyer in Russia investigation
has his own ties to the Kremlin
By Shawn Boburg
WA S H I N G T O N P O S T

WASHINGTON – The hard-charging New York lawyer President Trump
chose to represent him in the Russia investigation has prominent clients with
ties to the Kremlin, a striking pick for
a president trying to escape the persistent cloud that has trailed his administration.
Marc Kasowitz’s clients include Oleg
Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is
close to President Vladimir V. Putin and
has done business with Trump’s former campaign manager. Kasowitz also
represents Sberbank, Russia’s largest
state-owned bank, court records show.
Kasowitz has represented one of Deripaska’s companies for years in a civil lawsuit in New York and was scheduled to argue on the company’s behalf
May 25, two days after news broke that
Trump had hired him, court records
show.
A different lawyer in Kasowitz’s firm
showed up in court instead, avoiding a
scenario that would have highlighted
Kasowitz’s extensive work for high-profile Russian clients.
Kasowitz, whose scrappy style in the
courtroom mirrors Trump’s approach
to politics, represented Trump in various matters for more than a decade before he took on either Deripaska’s company or Sberbank, according to one of
Kasowitz’s partners in the firm.
Trump has turned to Kasowitz for
matters that include debt restructuring
and suing an author who Trump said
undercounted his net worth.
On Thursday, Kasowitz became the
public face of Trump’s counterattack on
former FBI director James Comey, challenging the former federal prosecutor’s
credibility and calling for Comey to be
investigated for leaks after his testimony to Congress.
As Kasowitz takes on his most highstakes work for Trump yet, the lawyer’s
Russian clients could cause complications.
“If the behavior of a Russian client of
the firm or its relationship with Trump
becomes an issue in the investigation, a
conflict could arise,” said Stephen Gillers of New York University Law School,
an expert on legal ethics.
Deripaska has said congressional
investigators have contacted his attorneys seeking information about his
business dealings with Paul Manafort,
a Trump campaign manager during
the presidential campaign. More than
a decade ago, Deripaska invested in a
fund that Manafort set up in the Cayman Islands that bought assets primarily in Ukraine.
The Associated Press reported in
March that Manafort “secretly worked
for” Deripaska as far back as 2006 to
influence politics and business dealings inside the United States to benefit
Putin’s government. Manafort signed a
$10 million annual contract beginning
in 2006 and maintained a business relationship until at least 2009, the AP reported.
Deripaska has denied the report,
and he sued the AP for libel last month.
Deripaska said he “never had any arrangement, whether contractual or otherwise, with Mr. Manafort to advance
the interests of the Russian government,” according to the lawsuit.
Former associates of Sberbank, the
other Russia-tied Kasowitz client, also
have come under scrutiny in media reports.
The bank’s former vice president,
who is now chief executive of another

Getty Images

Marc Kasowitz, attorney for President Trump, speaks Thursday at the National Press Club in Washington.
Kasowitz sought to counter former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony earlier in the day.

Russian state-owned financial institution, Vnesheconombank, met with
Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared
Kushner, in December.
Kushner’s interactions with the Russian banker are a part of the FBI’s investigation into potential coordination
between Moscow and the Trump campaign team.
Gillers said Kasowitz’s firm should
closely monitor potential conflicts. If
one arises, the firm probably would
have to drop one of its clients, he said.
A White House spokesman did not
respond to requests for comment Friday. Michael J. Bowe, a partner at the
law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres, declined to say whether the firm had discussed the possibility of potential conflicts arising from its Russian clients.
Bowe added that their representation
of the Russian firms and Trump “are
totally unrelated.”
CNN and BuzzFeed previously reported Kasowitz’s Russian clients.
Trump hired Kasowitz in 2001 to restructure debt on his firm’s Atlantic City
casinos. More recently, Kasowitz filed a
lawsuit against Timothy O’Brien, arguing that the author of “TrumpNation:
The Art of Being the Donald” had libeled Trump by understating the businessman’s wealth. Trump lost the case
in 2011. O’Brien told the Post last year
that Trump used Kasowitz because he

“always favored scrappy lawyers and
street fighters.”
Kasowitz also wrote a letter during
the presidential campaign threatening
to sue the New York Times for an article that said two women had accused
Trump of touching them inappropriately. Kasowitz said at the time it was
“nothing more than a politically motivated effort to defeat Mr. Trump’s candidacy.” No suit has been filed.
It’s not clear whether Kasowitz will
continue to represent Deripaska’s company, Veleron.
On Tuesday, Veleron lost an appeal
in federal court in Manhattan in its lawsuit against Morgan Stanley in a complex financial case involving a dispute
over a loan on which Veleron defaulted
during the height of the Great Recession. Kasowitz was scheduled to deliver oral arguments in the appeal last
month.
Records in the case reinforce Deripaska’s close ties to Putin.
When Deripaska’s company ran into
financial trouble in 2008 and needed to
put up more collateral to cover some
its liabilities, Deripaska put in a call to
Putin, who authorized the state-run
Vnesheconombank, or VEB, to offer
his firm a bailout, Deripaska acknowledged in court records.
In 2008, Forbes magazine listed Deripaska as the ninth-richest man in the

world. In 2006, the United States revoked his visa to enter the country, citing possible ties to organized crime.
He has denied those links, claiming
the allegations are part of an effort to
smear him.
Kasowitz represents Sberbank in a
2016 lawsuit that is still in its preliminary stages. A Russian businessman accuses the bank of conspiring with executives of a granite-mining company in
a “textbook case of Russian corporate
raiding.” The bank has not responded
in court filings.
Sberbank was one of the sponsors of
the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow produced by Trump, who owned
the competition. The deputy head of
the bank at the time was Sergey Gorkov,
who met with Kushner in December.
Gorkov, a graduate of the academy of
the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the
domestic successor of the former Soviet
KGB intelligence bureau, was named to
head VEB in February 2016.
VEB has maintained that Gorkov’s
meeting with Kushner was part of a
new business strategy and was conducted with Kushner in his role as the head
of his family’s real estate business. The
White House has said the meeting was
unrelated to business and was one of
many diplomatic encounters the soonto-be presidential adviser was holding
ahead of the inauguration.

Disclosures show 6 justices make 7 figures
By Dave Levinthal, Lateshia
Beachum and Carrie Levine
C E N T E R FOR PU BL IC I N T E GR I T Y

WASHINGTON – At least six – and
possibly all nine – Supreme Court justices are millionaires, according to a
Center for Public Integrity analysis of
new personal financial disclosures released Thursday.
Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer
leads all justices with a minimum reportable net worth of $6.15 million in
2016 – almost unchanged from the year
before. Breyer’s portfolio as of Dec. 31
could, however, be worth more than $16
million.
Authorship padded Breyer’s income:
He reported $45,000 in royalties from
Penguin Random House, which last
year released the paperback edition of
his book, “The Court and the World.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is
similarly wealthy, with a minimum reportable net worth of more than $5 million – and a maximum of nearly $11 million.
Mutual funds and education savings
plans comprise the bulk of Roberts’ as-

sets, which appear to have grown from
2015, when his minimum reportable assets were valued at about $4.24 million,
to 2016.
He also reported several sizable individual stock holdings, including at least
$500,000 each in media and entertainment giant Time Warner Inc. and Texas
Instruments, and at least $100,001 in
Sirius XM Radio and medical research
supply company Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Roberts furthermore owns part of a
cottage in Limerick, Ireland, worth up
to $50,000.
Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are also
members of the seven-figures club. Sotomayor saw her minimum net worth
jump from about $1 million in 2015 to
more than $1.5 million in 2016.
Only Associate Justices Anthony
Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, who
both reported a minimum net worth
just south of $600,000, aren’t guaranteed millionaires. (Their maximum net
worth is more than $1 million.)
Assets and liabilities listed on the

disclosure forms, which justices file annually, are reported in broad ranges.
This makes it impossible to say precisely how much each justice is worth.
Justices are also exempt from disclosing the value of their homes, making a
precise calculation even more difficult.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a nominee
of President Trump who joined the high
court in April after previously serving
as a federal appellate judge, has not yet
filed a 2016 personal financial disclosure, having received an extension, Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg confirmed.
Gorsuch’s 2015 personal financial
disclosure indicated his investment
portfolio was worth at least $3.1 million
and as much as $7.2 million.
Breyer proved to be the most jet-setting Supreme Court justice of 2016, reporting 19 separate trips during which
some entity – Harvard Law School,
the American Psychiatric Association
and the Pritzker Foundation, for three
– paid for at least some of his travel or
accommodations. Several of the events
involved Breyer’s book, and four events
took him to France, Spain or the United

Kingdom.
Ginsburg – at 84, the oldest member
of the court – is nevertheless a notorious
traveler herself, making 12 paid trips in
2016, including three in Europe.
One took her to Loyola University
Chicago, which in September hosted a
“Tribute to Justice Scalia program.”
Although Ginsberg and the late Justice Antonin Scalia were ideological
foils – he a rock-ribbed conservative,
she an unabashed liberal – the two also
were best of friends, reveling in a shared
love of opera, travel and general socializing.
Sotomayor and Alito each took 11
paid trips. In August 2016, Sotomayor
attended several events at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks that were cosponsored by Alaska Airlines. Her travel
was paid for through vouchers donated
by Alaska Airlines to the university.
Most of Alito’s reimbursable travel appears to involve teaching stints, according to his disclosure. Kagan (six trips),
Thomas (six) and Kennedy (five) also
benefitted last year from subsidized
travel. None of the justices are required
to disclose the value of their trips.